The Floorsland: Anniversary

So I've decided to make the next game from The Floorsland series and I've a little enquiry to make about instructions.

I've tried different approaches to this before. Games with no instructions have had people complaining about it despite the instructions being ignored when I put them in. For The Floorsland Origins I tried forcing you to play a tutorial level, but that backfired badly: due to people most likely skipping through all the dialogues, they were left completely unaware of certain non-obvious physics and thus were unable to proceed. I have a feeling that this is the reason the game has such a low score: people get stuck due to their own ignorance. Just play the game if you want to know what I'm talking about.

I'm thinking what to do for The Floorsland: Anniversary. Tutorial levels won't help and putting the tutorial in the first level will simply backfire like that again. Here's my question: how do you think I should do it? I'm clueless about telling ignorant players about game mechanics and the only thing I can think of is not having them required, but rather giving you access to powerups and stuff if you do listen to the explanation and apply those mechanics.